Edward Said

Edward Wadie Saïd
Born	Edward Wadie Saïd (1935-11-01)November 1, 1935 Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine
Died	September 25, 2003(2003-09-25) (aged 67) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	Palestinian-American
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Post-colonialism, Post-modernism
Notable ideas	Occidentalism, Orientalism, "The Other"

Edward Wadie Saïd (Arabic pronunciation: [wædiːʕ sæʕiːd] Template:Lang-ar, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian–American literary theoretician, University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and a public intellectual who was a founding figure of the critical field of post-colonialism. He was born a Palestinian Arab in the Jerusalem of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–48), and was American through his father, Wadie Saïd, who was a U.S. citizen. As such, Edward Saïd was an advocate for the political and human rights of the Palestinian people, whom the commentator Robert Fisk described as their most powerful voice.

As an influential cultural critic, academic, and writer, Edward Saïd was best known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critical analysis of the cultural ideas and concepts that are the bases of Orientalism — the Western study of Eastern cultures. He proposed and contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, making much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and therefore intellectually suspect. Orientalism is based upon Saïd’s intimate knowledge of colonial literature, such as the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and the post-structuralist theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other such philosophers; thus, Orientalism, and other thematically related works, proved analytically influential in the fields of the humanities, especially in literary theory and in literary criticism. Moreover, Orientalism proved especially influential upon Middle Eastern studies, wherein it transformed the academic discourse of the field’s practitioners, of how they examine, describe, and define the cultures of the Middle East. He vigorously discussed and debated the cultural subjects comprised by Orientalism, especially as applied to and in the fields of history and area studies; nonetheless, some mainstream academics disagreed with Saïd’s Orientalism thesis, especially the Anglo–American Orientalist Bernard Lewis.

As a public intellectual, he discussed contemporary politics, music, culture, and literature, in lectures, newspaper and magazine articles, and books. Drawing from his family experiences, as Palestinian Christians in the Middle East, at the time of the establishment of Israel (1948), Saïd argued for the establishment of a Palestinian state, for equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel — including the right of return — and for increased U.S. political pressure upon Israel to recognize, grant, and respect said rights; he also criticized the political and cultural politics of Arab and Muslim régimes. He received a Western education in the U.S., where he resided from adolescence until his death in 2003; as such, in his memoir, Out of Place (1999), Saïd applied his dual cultural heritage to narrow the gap of political and cultural understanding between The West and the Middle East, and to improve Western understanding of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His decade-long membership in the Palestinian National Council, and his pro–Palestinian political activism, made him a controversial public intellectual.

In 1999, with his friend Daniel Barenboim, Saïd co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville, which comprises young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians; besides being a Renaissance Man, Edward Saïd was an accomplished pianist. He and Barenboim published Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a book of their conversations about music. Intellectually active until the last months of his life, Edward Wadie Saïd died of leukemia in 2003.

Early life

Edward Saïd and his sister, Rosemarie Saïd (1940)

Edward Wadie Saïd was born in the Jerusalem city of the British Mandate of Palestine on 1 November 1935. He was the son of Wadie Saïd, a businessman, and an American citizen, who soldiered in the U.S. Army, under General Pershing, in the First World War (1914–18); post–War, Wadie Saïd, moved to Cairo, before the birth of his son Edward Wadie. Like her husband, Mrs Saïd was an Arab Christian born in Nazareth, a small town in Palestine; the variety of Christianity they practiced was of the Greek Orthodox Jerusalemite; but Edward was not religious. Edward’s sister, Rosemarie Saïd Zahlan (1937–2006), was an historian and a writer.

At school

Autobiographically, Edward Saïd described a childhood lived “between worlds” — in Cairo (Egypt) and in Jerusalem (Palestine) — until he was a twelve-year-old lad. In 1947, Edward Saïd attended the Anglican St. George's School, Jerusalem, about which boyhood experience he said:

With an unexceptionally Arab family name like “Saïd”, connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.

The school days of Edward Saïd included Victoria College, Alexandria, where one classmate was Michel Shaloub (later the actor Omar Sharif) whom Saïd remembered as a sadistic and physically abusive Head Boy. In 1951, Saïd was expelled from Victoria College for being a troublemaker, and consequently was sent from Egypt to the United States, to Northfield Mount Hermon School, Massachusetts, an élite college-prep boarding-school, where he endured a miserable year of feeling out of place; yet he excelled academically, achieving the rank of either first or second in a class of one hundred sixty students. In retrospect, Saïd said that having been sent away to a place so far from the Middle East was a parental decision much influenced by “the prospects of deracinated people, like us, being so uncertain that it would be best to send me as far away as possible”. Hence, the themes of dissonance — of interwoven cultures, of feeling out of place, and of being far from home — so affected the boy Edward Saïd, that they continually arose in the academic, political, and intellectual works he produced as a man. Edward Wadie Saïd matured into an intellectual young man, fluent in the English, French, and Arabic languages, who earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Princeton University (1957), then a Master of Arts degree (1960) and a Doctoral Degree in English Literature (1964) from Harvard University.

Career

In 1963, Edward Saïd joined Columbia University, as a member of the faculties of the department of English and of the department of Comparative Literature, where he taught and worked until 2003. In 1974, he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard College; in the 1975–76 biennium he was a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science, at Stanford University; in 1977, he was the Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and subsequently was the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities; and, in 1979, he was Visiting Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

As a peripatetic academic, he also worked as a visiting professor at Yale University, and lectured at more than one hundred universities. In 1992, he was promoted to University Professor, the highest-ranking academic job at Columbia University. Editorially, Edward Saïd served as president of the Modern Language Association; as editor of the Arab Studies Quarterly in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; on the executive board of International PEN; in the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in the Royal Society of Literature; in the Council of Foreign Relations; and he was a member of the American Philosophical Society.

In 1993, he presented the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures, a six-lecture series titled Representation of the Intellectual, wherein he examined the role of the public intellectual in contemporary society, which the BBC later published in 2011. As a university professor, Saïd made few visiting lectures, but, in the 1990s, did so at the Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario; some 30,000 students attended his lectures. The works of Edward Saïd have been translated into twenty-six languages; among the subjects are literature, politics, the Middle East, music, and culture; and were published by magazines and newspapers such as The Nation, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch, Al Ahram, and the pan-Arab daily newspaper al-Hayat.

Literary criticism

The first book that Edward Saïd published, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), was an expansion of the doctoral dissertation he presented to earn the degree. Afterwards, Saïd redacted the ideas gleaned from the works of Giambattista Vico, and other intellectuals, in the book Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974), about the theoretical bases of literary criticism.His further literary production includes the books The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature: Yeats and Decolonization (1988), Culture and Imperialism (1993), Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (1994), Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and On Late Style (2006).

Like his post-modern intellectual mentors (Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault), he was fascinated by how the people of the Western world perceive the peoples of and the things from a different culture, and by the effects of society, politics, and power upon literature, thus is Edward Saïd a founding intellectual of post-colonial criticism. Although his critique of Orientalism is an especially important cultural contribution, it was his critical interpretations of the works of Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, and other writers, that were the influential scholarship that established his intellectual reputation.

Orientalism

Orientalism: The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus (1511)

The cultural critic Edward Saïd is most famous for the description and the critique of Orientalism as the source of the cultural inaccuracies that are the foundation of Western thought towards the Middle East. The book Orientalism (1978) proposed the existence of a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo–Islamic peoples and their culture”, which derives from Western culture’s long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia, in general, and the Middle East, in particular, which serve as implicit justifications for European and U.S. colonial and imperialist ambitions. Nonetheless, Saïd also criticized and denounced the political and cultural malpractices of the ruling Arab élites who have internalized the falsely romanticized Arabic culture conceived and established by Anglo–American Orientalists.

So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.

In Orientalism, Saïd proposed and contended that much Western study of Islamic civilization was political intellectualism bent on self-affirmation, rather than objective enquiry and study, it functioned as a method of cultural discrimination, and as a tool of imperialist domination. As such, Orientalism has exerted much intellectual impact upon the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, human geography, history, and Oriental studies. Parting from the works of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and those of the early Western critics of Orientalism — such as Abdul Latif Tibawi (“English-speaking Orientalists: A Critique of Their Approach to Islam and Arab Nationalism”, 1964), Anouar Abdel-Malek (“L’orientalisme en crise”; “Orientalism in Crisis”, 1963), Maxime Rodinson (“Bilan des études mohammadiennes” | “Assessment of Mohammedan Studies”, 1963), and Richard William Southern (Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages, 1978), — that “Orientalism” (“The Orient” as studied from “The West”) and the derived perceptions of “The East” purveyed in them, are intellectually suspect, and cannot be accepted at their face value, as faithful, true, and accurate representations of Oriental peoples and things. That the history of European colonial rule, and of the consequent political domination of the civilizations of the East, distorts the writing of even the most knowledgeable, well-meaning, and culturally sympathetic Western Orientalists; thus was the term “Orientalism” rendered into a pejorative.

I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India, or Egypt, in the later nineteenth century, took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status, in his mind, as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact — and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism.

That, since Antiquity, “The Orient” has been stereotypically represented in Western art and literature, as in the Greek tragic play The Persians (472 BC), by Aeschylus, wherein the protagonist fails and falls because he misperceived the true nature of The East. Contemporarily, Europe has politically dominated Asia to the degree that even the most outwardly objective Western texts about “The Orient’’ are culturally biased to a degree unrecognized by Western scholars, who appropriated for themselves the intellectual tasks of study, the exploration, and the interpretation of the languages, histories, and cultures of the Orient; thereby implying that such (subaltern) peoples were incapable of speaking for themselves, and much less capable of composing their own cultural and historical narratives. Western (European) Orientalists have written Asia’s past — and thus constructed its modern identities — from a perspective that establishes The West (Europe) as the cultural norm to emulate, from which norm the “exotic and inscrutable” Orient deviates.

Orientalism concluded that Western writing about The Orient depicts it as an irrational, weak and feminised “Other”, which is greatly contrasted with the rational, strong, and masculine “West”, which derives from the European psychological need to create a “difference” of cultural inequality between The West and The East that is attributable to immutable cultural “essences” inherent to “Oriental” peoples and things. The intellectual, cultural, and commercial successes of Orientalism in 1978, were aided by the historical resonance of the Yom Kippur war (6–25 October 1973), and the 1973 Oil Embargo crises of reduced petroleum-production, with which the OPEC countries made themselves politically known to The Western World.

Criticism

Intellectual and academic

Orientalism (1978) provoked much theoretic criticism of the work, and personal controversy about Edward Saïd, the author and the man. In “The Mightier Pen? Edward Saïd and the Double Standards of Inside-out Colonialism” (1993), Ernest Gellner said that Saïd’s contentions that the West had dominated the East for more than 2,000 years were unsupportable, because, until the late 17th century, the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) remained a great politico-military threat to Europe. In “Disraeli as an Orientalist: The Polemical Errors of Edward Saïd” (2005), Mark Proudman reported that Saïd said that the British Empire extended from Egypt to India in the late 19th century, when, in fact, the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire also were active imperial actors in that geopolitical theatre. In Empire and Information (1999), C.A. Bayly said that, at the height of European imperialism, European power in the Orient was not absolute, and much depended upon local collaborators, who often subverted the imperial strategies of the European powers with whom they collaborated against their own peoples. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies (2006), Robert Irwin said that Palestine and Egypt were poor historical examples of Orientalism, because they were under European control for short periods in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Conversely, that Saïd devoted less attention to the more apt examples of the British Raj in India, and to Russia’s Asian dominions — because he (Saïd) sought to score political points against Western misbehavior in the Middle East.

The criticism by Orientalists such as Albert Hourani, Robert Graham Irwin, Nikki Keddie, Bernard Lewis, and Kanan Makiya, addressed what the historian Keddie said was “some unfortunate consequences” of Orientalism upon the perception and the status of their scholarship. In Approaches to the History of the Middle East, Keddie said that Edweard Saïd’s critical Orientalism work had:

unfortunate consequences . . . I think that there has been a tendency in the Middle East [studies] field to adopt the word "Orientalism" as a generalized swear-word, essentially referring to people who take the “wrong” position on the Arab–Israeli dispute, or to people who are judged too “conservative”. It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines. So, "Orientalism", for many people, is a word that substitutes for thought, and enables people to dismiss certain scholars and their works. I think that is too bad. It may not have been what Edward Saïd meant, at all, but the term has become a kind of slogan.

Moreover, the Anglo–American Orientalist Bernard Lewis was a nemesis especially at odds with the thesis of Orientalism, wherein Saïd identified Lewis as:

a perfect exemplification [of an] Establishment Orientalist [whose work] purports to be objective, liberal scholarship, but is, in reality, very close to being propaganda against his subject material.

Lewis replied to Saïd’s characterization of him with several essays; and later was joined by the academics Maxime Rodinson, Jacques Berque, Malcolm Kerr, Aijaz Ahmad, and William Montgomery Watt, who said that Orientalism is a flawed account of Western scholarship about “The Orient”.

In the article “Edward Saïd’s Shadowy Legacy” (2008), Robert Irwin said that the serious flaw in "Orientalism" was Saïd’s not distinguishing among the different types of Orientalist writers, because they did not share the same cultural perspective towards the peoples and places of the Orient, writers such as the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who never travelled to the East), the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (who toured Egypt), the French geographer Ernest Renan (whose work is racist in perspective), and the British Orientalist, translator, and lexicographer Edward William Lane, who was fluent in Arabic. In Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (2007), Ibn Warraq said that the varied origins and cultural attitudes of European Orientalists over-rode factual and historical considerations, which Saïd ignored in order to construct a stereotype of Europeans befitting his thesis about the nature of Orientalism. In For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, Robert Irwin said that Saïd ignored the domination of 19th-century Oriental studies by German and Hungarian Orientalists, scholars from countries without imperial colonies in the Orient.

In The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past (1988), O.P. Kejariwal said that Edward Saïd created a monolithic Occidentalism to oppose the monolithic Orientalism of Western discourse, by having failed to distinguish among the paradigms of Romanticism and the secular intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment. That he ignored the wide range and fundamental differences of opinion among Western scholars about the nature of Oriental peoples and things; that he failed to acknowledge that Orientalists, such as the philologist William Jones, sought to establish cultural kinship rather than cultural difference between The East and The West; and that such scholars often made discoveries that later provided the foundations of anti-colonial nationalism.

Generally, the critics of Edward Saïd argued that he, and his followers, failed to critically distinguish among the varieties of Orientalism presented in the Western mass communications media and in its popular culture — such as the fantastic Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) — and Western academic studies of Oriental languages and literatures, histories and cultures.

In the article “Who is Afraid of Edward Saïd?” (1999), Biswamoy Pati said that by establishing ethnicity and cultural background as the tests of authority and objectivity in studying the Orient, Edward Saïd drew attention to the question of his own ethnic and cultural identities as a Palestinian and as a Subaltern. In the article "Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire", D.A. Washbrook said that Saïd was disqualified from writing about the Orient because of his Anglophone rearing, schooling, and education at an élite school in Cairo; because he had lived most of his adult life in the U.S.; and because he was a distinguished university professor who argued that: “any and all representations . . . are embedded, first, in the language, and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer . . . [and are] interwoven with a great many other things besides the ‘truth’, which is, itself, a representation”. That excessive cultural relativism trapped Saïd, and his post-colonial theorist followers, in a "web of solipsism", which limits him and them to speak only of "representations", whilst simultaneously allowing them to deny the existence of any objective truth about the Orient.

Consequences of such academic and intellectual criticism were the Jewish Defense League, in 1985, stating that Saïd was a Nazi, because of his anti–Zionism, which they misrepresented as anti-Semitism; an arsonist setting afire his office at Columbia University; and attempted intimidation, personal and of his family, with continual, “innumerable death threats”, which arose from his political stances as an public intellectual.

Character assassination

To undermine Edward Saïd as a public intellectual qualified to speak of and about the Palestinian dispossession by Israel, Justus Weiner, an American lawyer and resident scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs think-tank, said that Saïd was dishonest about his childhood biography. In the Commentary magazine article “My Beautiful Old House and Other Fabrications by Edward Saïd” (1999), Weiner impugned Saïd’s intellectual honesty and personal integrity when he said that Saïd lied when he said: “I was born in Jerusalem, and spent most of my formative years there; and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt.” Despite having acknowledged that Edward Saïd was born in Jerusalem (Palestine), Weiner reported that Saïd’s birth certificate lists a Cairo (Egypt) residential address for the Saïd family; that the boy Edward Saïd did not live his formative, boyhood years in Jerusalem with his family, but in Cairo; and that the boy Edward had not been a full-time student at the St. George's School, Jerusalem, because the school’s register had no record of his matriculation to the school. Moreover, when questioned about impugning Saïd’s personal integrity and honesty with such minor biographic matters, to the journalist Christopher Hitchens, Justus Weiner acknowledged that he had not interviewed Edward Saïd; yet defended his claims of Saïd’s dishonesty and lack of personal integrity, by saying that three years of research into the Saïd childhood had made it unnecessary to interview Edward Saïd about his boyhood in the British Mandate of Palestine and student days in the Middle East; Weiner thus explained:

The evidence became so overwhelming. It was no longer an issue of discrepancies. It was a chasm. There was no point in calling him up and saying, “You’re a liar, you’re a fraud”.

To Saïd’s defense arose three journalists and an historian, who said that the claims of Justus Weiner were false. In the Counterpunch newsletter article “Commentary ‘Scholar’ Deliberately Falsified Record in Attack on Saïd” (1999), Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported that Weiner had deliberately falsified the biographic record to attack Saïd. In evidence, they presented an interview of Haig Boyadjian, who said that he had explicitly told Justus Weiner that he had been a classmate of Edward Saïd at the St. George's School, Jerusalem, which fact Weiner omitted from his biographic Saïd reportage. In The Nation magazine article “The ‘Commentary’ School of Falsification” (1999), Christopher Hitchens described Weiner’s article as a work of “extraordinary spite and mendacity”; and reported that schoolmates and instructors confirmed that Edward Saïd had been a student at the St. George Academy; they quoted Saïd, from 1992, that he had spent much of his youth in Cairo. In The New York Review of Books, the historian Amos Elon described Justus Weiner’s article “Exile’s Return”, as a “diatribe”, and accused him of waging a “personal smear campaign” against Edward Saïd, and that Weiner failed to disprove that, in the winter of 1947–1948, when the Arab League declared the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the Saïd family moved from the Talbiya neighborhood of Jerusalem, and returned to Cairo:

[Edward Saïd] and his family sought refuge from the war outside Palestine, as did hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians at the time. The fact remains, that shortly afterward, the [Saïd] family’s property in Jerusalem was confiscated. Saïd and his family became political refugees as the result of the Israeli government’s refusal to allow them to return to the country of their birth.

In retort, Justus Weiner accused the historian Amos Elon of intellectual dishonesty, and accused the journalist Christopher Hitchens of having made himself “a poster boy for Palestine”. About such biographic controversy, Edward Saïd said that the publishers of the politically conservative Commentary magazine had attacked him in three, long articles; that the third article was the character-assassination article by Justus Weiner; and that, as a biographic article about his childhood and student days, its credibility was “undercut by dozens of mistakes of fact”.

Influence

Edward Saïd was a personally charismatic public intellectual who was (perhaps) hyperbolically praised as an “intellectual superstar”, because his range of enquiry comprehended literary theory and comparative literature, history and political commentary, cultural criticism and music criticism, and other fields. Since its publication in the late 20th century, Orientalism (1978) proved to be an intellectual document central to the field of post-colonial studies, because its thesis remains historically factual, true, and accurate for the pertinent periods studied, and especially regarding the cultural representations of “Orientals” and “The Orient” presented in the mass communications media of the West. Nonetheless, the supporters of Saïd’s scholarship acknowledged that the scope of Orientalism is limited concerning German Orientalist scholarship. Moreover, in the Afterword to the 1995 edition of Orientalism, Saïd presented follow-up refutations of the criticisms that Bernard Lewis registered against the first edition of the book.

Critics and supporters of Edward Saïd acknowledge the transformative influence of Orientalism upon scholarship in the humanities — the former say its influence is intellectually limiting, whilst the latter say it is an intellectually liberating influence upon scholars. Post-colonial studies, of which Saïd was a founder, and a scholarly reference, is a fertile and thriving field of intellectual enquiry that helps explain the post-colonial world and its peoples. Hence the continued investigational validity and analytical efficacy of the critical propositions presented in Orientalism, especially in the field of Middle Eastern studies.

Saïd’s scholarship remains critically pertinent to and intellectually relevant in the fields of literary criticism and cultural studies, notably upon scholars studying India, such as Gyan Prakash (“Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography”, 1990), Nicholas Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001), and Ronald Inden (Imagining India, 1990); and upon scholars studying Cambodia, such as Simon Springer (“Culture of Violence or Violent Orientalism? Neoliberalisation and Imagining the ‘Savage Other’ in Post-transitional Cambodia”, 2009); and upon literary theorists such as Homi K. Bhabha (Nation and Narration, 1990), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 1987), and Hamid Dabashi.

Elswewhere, in and about Eastern Europe, Milica Bakić–Hayden developed the concept of Nesting Orientalisms (1992) based upon the ideas of the historian Larry Wollf (Inventing Eastern Europe) and upon the ideas presented in "Orientalism". In turn, the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova (Imagining the Balkans, 1997) presented her ethnologic concept of "Nesting Balkanisms" (1997), which is conceptually related to and derived from Milica Bakić–Hayden’s "Nesting Orientalisms".

Music

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

Besides having been an accomplished public intellectual, privately, the Renaissance Man Edward Saïd was an accomplished pianist who also worked as the music critic for The Nation magazine; as such, he wrote three books about music: Musical Elaborations (1991); Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), co-authored with Daniel Barenboim; and On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006). In Music at the Limits (2007), Saïd said that he found reflections of his ideas about literature and history in music, especially in bold compositions and strong performances. The composer Mohammed Fairouz said that he has been deeply influenced by the writings of Edward Saïd; compositionally, he produced the First Symphony, which alludes to the essay “Homage to a Belly-Dancer'”, about Tahia Carioca; and a piano sonata titled Reflections on Exile, which refers to the eponymous collection of essays.

In 1999, Saïd and Daniel Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is composed of young Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians. They also established The Barenboim–Said Foundation in Seville, for which a government-funded foundation was constituted, in 2004, to develop education-through-music projects. Besides managing the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Barenboim–Said Foundation assists with the administration of the Academy of Orchestral Studies, the Musical Education in Palestine project, and the Early Childhood Musical Education Project, in Seville.

Politics

Pro–Palestinian activism

The State of Palestine

The university professor Edward Saïd became politically active in 1967, and, since then, participated in the political and diplomatic efforts for the establishment of a Palestinian state. From 1977 until 1991, he was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). In 1988, he was a proponent of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1948), and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council meeting in Algiers. In 1993, he quit his membership to the Palestinian National Council, to protest the politics that lead to the signing of the Oslo Accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, 1993), because he thought the accord terms unacceptable, and because they had been rejected by the Madrid Conference of 1991. He said that the Oslo Accords would not produce an independent Palestine, and that it was inferior to a plan that Yasir Arafat had rejected, which plan Saïd had presented to Arafat in behalf of the U.S. Government in the late 1970s. Especially troublesome to Saïd was his belief that Yasir Arafat had betrayed the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to return to their houses and properties in the Green Line territories of pre-1967 Israel; and that Arafat ignored the growing political threat of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories established since the conquest in 1967. Moreover, by 1995, in response to Saïd’s political criticisms the Palestinian Authority banned the sale of Saïd’s books, yet did improve when he publicly praised Yasir Arafat for rejecting Prime Minister Ehud Barak's minimal offers at the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David (2000) in the U.S.

In the essay Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims (1979), Edward Saïd argued for the political legitimacy and philosophic authenticity of the Zionist claims and rights to a Jewish homeland, and of the inherent right of national self-determination of the Palestinian people. Saïd’s books on the matters of Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the Peace Process (2000). He wrote the foreword to Jewish History, Jewish Religion, by Israel Shahak, which proposes that Israel′s behavior towards and mistreatment of the Palestinian people is rooted in a Judaic requirement (permission) for Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against Gentiles (non-Jews). In the foreword, Saïd said that Shahak wrote a book that is ″nothing less than a concise history of classic and modern Judaism, insofar as these are relevant to the understanding of modern Israel″; and praised Shahak for describing contemporary Israel as a country and nation subsumed in a ″Judeo–Nazi″ cultural ambience that allowed the dehumanization of the Palestinian Other:

In all my works, I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalisn. . . . My view of Palestine . . . remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism, and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested, instead, a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement, between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war.

Saïd made a documentary film about Palestine for BBC titled In Search of Palestine. BBC was unsuccessful in getting it on U.S. television.

The national flag of Palestine

The intellectual in action

On 3 July 2000, whilst travelling with his son, as tourists in the Middle East, the Columbia University professor Edward Saïd was photographed throwing a stone across the Blue Line Lebanese–Israel border, which image elicited much political criticism about his action demonstrating an inherent, personal sympathy with terrorism. Saïd explained his stone-throwing action as merely a man-to-man contest-of-skill between a father and his son, and as a gesture symbolic of an Arab Man′s joy at the end of Israel’s occupation of Lebanon:

It was a pebble; there was nobody there. The guardhouse was at least half a mile away.

Despite having denied that he aimed the stone at an Israeli guardhouse wathctower, the As-Safir newspaper reported that a local Lebanese resident said that the tourist Saïd was less than ten metres (ca. 30 ft.) from the IDF soldiers manning the two-storey guardhouse, when Saïd aimed and threw the stone over the border fence; the stone′s projectile path was thwarted when it struck the barbed wire atop the fence. Nonetheless, despite the political fracas among some right-wing Columbia University students and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith International (Sons of the Covenant), the University Provost published a five-page letter wherein Columbia University defended Saïd’s action as an academic′s freedom of expression; the gist of the defense was:

To my knowledge, the stone was directed at no-one; no law was broken; no indictment was made; no criminal or civil action has been taken against Professor Saïd.

Nevertheless, Saïd endured later political repercussions, such as the cancellation of an invitation to give a lecture to the Freud Society, in Austria, in February 2001. The President of the Freud Society justified withdrawing the invitation from Prof. Saïd by explaining that ″the political situation in the Middle East and its consequences″ had rendered an accusation of anti-Semitism very serious, and thus any such accusation ″has become more dangerous″ in the politics of Austria; thus, the Freud Society had decided to cancel Saïd′s invitation in order to "to avoid an internal clash" of opinions about him that might prove divisive of the Society. In Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward Saïd (2003), as a public intellectual, Saïd likened his political situation to that perdured by Noam Chomsky:

It′s very similar to his. He′s a well-known, great linguist. He′s been celebrated and honored for that, but he′s also vilified as an anti-Semite and as a Hitler worshiper. . . . For anyone to deny the horrendous experience of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is unacceptable. We don′t want anybody’s history of suffering to go unrecorded and unacknowledged. On the other hand, there’s a great difference, between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people.

In 2003, Edward Saïd, Haidar Abdel-Shafi, Ibrahim Dakak, and Mustafa Barghouti established Al-Mubadara (the Palestinian National Initiative), a political movement, headed by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, meant to be a third-party political force in the politics of Palestine, and to be a reformist and democratic alternative to the respectively extremist politics of the social-democratic Fatah and of the Islamist Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement). In January 2006, anthropologist David Price obtained 147 pages of the 283-page political dossier that the FBI had compiled on Edward Saïd, which indicated that the university professor Edward Wadie Saïd had been spied upon since 1971, four years since he had become a public intellectual active in the politics to the U.S.

Criticism of U.S. foreign policy

In the revised edition of Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1997), Saïd criticized Western-biased reportage about the Middle East and Islam, and especially the mass media's “speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings, sabotage commercial airliners, and poison water supplies.” He criticized the American involvement in the Kosovo War, the Iraq Liberation Act (1998), promulgated during the Clinton Administration, and the continual support of the U.S. for Israel. Despite being sick with leukemia, as a public intellectual, Saïd continued his criticism of the 2003 invasion of Iraq; in April 2003, in the Egyptian newspaper, the Al-Ahram Weekly, Saïd said that the U.S. war against was ill-conceived:

My strong opinion, though I don't have any proof in the classical sense of the word, is that they want to change the entire Middle East and the Arab world, perhaps terminate some countries, destroy the so-called terrorist groups they dislike and install régimes friendly to the United States. I think this is a dream that has very little basis in reality. The knowledge they have of the Middle East, to judge from the people who advise them, is, to say the least, out of date and widely speculative. . . .

I don't think the planning for the post–Saddam, post-war period in Iraq is very sophisticated, and there's very little of it. U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman and U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith testified in Congress, about a month ago, and seemed to have no figures, and no ideas what structures they were going to deploy; they had no idea about the use of institutions that exist, although they want to de–Ba'thise the higher echelons and keep the rest.

The same is true about their views of the [Iraqi] army. They certainly have no use for the Iraqi opposition that they've been spending many millions of dollars on; and, to the best of my ability to judge, they are going to improvise; of course, the model is Afghanistan. I think they hope that the UN will come in and do something, but, given the recent French and Russian positions, I doubt that that will happen with such simplicity.

Death and tributes

An al-Mubadara memorial poster of Edward Said on the Israeli West Bank wall

Edward Said died at age 67 in the early morning of September 25, 2003, in New York City, after a 12 year-long battle with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He was survived by his wife of 33 years, Mariam (née Cortas); a son, Wadie, and a daughter, Najla, an actress, playwright, and founding member of the Arab-American theatre collective Nibras.

Subsequently, several prominent writers published eulogies for Said, including Alexander Cockburn, Seamus Deane Christopher Hitchens, Tony Judt, Michael Wood, and Tariq Ali.

In November 2004, Birzeit University renamed its music school as the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Saïd’s honor.

In 2008, Verso Books published Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, a book of essays by 15 authors, including Akeel Bilgrami, Rashid Khalidi and Elias Khoury. The book was edited by Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Bașak Ertür.

A critical memoir, Edward Saïd: the Charisma of Criticism by H. Aram Veeser was published by Routledge in March 2010.

In August 2010, the University of California Press published a large volume of essays by some 29 authors about every aspect of Said's intellectual contributions. Edited by Adel Iskandar and Hakem Rustom, Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representations includes interviews with Noam Chomsky, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Daniel Barenboim, as well as the writings of Joseph Massad, Jacqueline Rose, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Ella Shohat, Asha Varadhjan, RR Radhakrishnan, Ardi Imseis, Ghada Karmi, Sabry Hafez and many others.

Edward Said memorial lectures

Main article: List of Edward Said memorial lectures

Since Said's death in 2003, several institutions have instituted annual lecture series in his memory, including Columbia University, University of Warwick, Princeton University, University of Adelaide, American University of Cairo, and Palestine Center, with such notables speaking as Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and Cornel West.

Bibliography

Main article: Edward Said bibliography

Awards

Besides honors, memberships, and postings to prestigious organizations, Edward Saïd was awarded some twenty honorary university degrees world-wide. Among the honors bestowed to him was the Bowdoin Prize by Harvard University. He twice received the Lionel Trilling Book Award; the first occasion was the initial bestowing of the literary award in 1976, for Beginnings: Intention and Method (1974). He also received the Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, and the inaugural Spinoza Lens Award. In 2001, Saïd was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2002, he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and he was the first U.S. citizen to receive the Sultan Owais prize. The autobiography Out of Place was bestowed three awards, the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature. In 2003, shortly before his death, Edward Saïd was named an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society, of Trinity College, Dublin.

Honorary Degree at The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS): Orientalism once more (2003) / Edward W. Said / The Hague: ISS, 2003. Lecture delivered on the occasion of the awarding of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa on the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, 21 May 2003.

See also

• Blaming the Victims
• List of Columbia University people
• Palestinian Christians
• Projects working for peace among Arabs and Israelis

Further reading

Counterpoints: Edward Said's Legacy

• Kennedy, Valerie. Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.
• McCarthy, Conor. The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Rubin, Andrew N., ed. Humanism, Freedom, and the Critic: Edward W. Said and After. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

External links

• The Edward Said Archive
• "Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights." Lecture given at UC Berkeley. Part 1, Part 2.
• "Barenboim and Said: 'Parallels and Paradoxes". Interview with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday (2002-12-28, National Public Radio).
• Democracy Now! interview with Edward Said (2001-3-14)
• Edward Said at ZMagazine.org
• Edward Said at The Electronic Intifada
• Edward Said at IMDb
• Review of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays and Edward Said: The Last Interview, in Other Voices, vol. 3, no. 1.
• Works by Edward Said at Open Library
• Edward Wadie Said at the International Institute of Social Studies
• Booknotes interview with Said on Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, June 17, 2001.